Geldolph Adriaan Kessler
| Personal information | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Full name | Geldolph Adriaan Kessler | ||
| Date of birth | 2 April 1884 | ||
| Place of birth | Batavia, Dutch East Indies | ||
| Date of death | 20 August 1945 (aged 61) | ||
| Place of death | Velsen, Netherlands | ||
| Senior career* | |||
| Years | Team | Apps | (Gls) |
| HVV Den Haag | |||
| National team | |||
| 1905–1906 | Netherlands | 3 | (0) |
| * Senior club appearances and goals counted for the domestic league only. | |||
Geldolph Adriaan "Dolf" Kessler (2 April 1884 – 20 August 1945) was a Dutch footballer and industrialist. Kessler – along with brother Boeli and cousins Tonny and Dé – played club football for amateur side HVV Den Haag. Kessler also won three caps for the Dutch national side between 1905 and 1906.
Kessler was born in a very wealthy family from The Hague, the oldest son of six children. His father Jean Baptiste August Kessler (1853–1900) was the first director of the Koninklijke Maatschappij tot exploitatie van Petroleumbronnen in Nederlandsch-Indië (K.N.M.E.P.) (Royal Dutch Society for the exploitation of Petroleumsources in the Dutch East-Indies), which would eventually turn into the Koninklijke Nederlandse Petroleum Maatschappij (Royal Dutch Petroleum Company), now named Royal Dutch Shell.
Dolf made his debut as a football player at seventeen years of age, at the Hague football club HVV. At first he stood leftback, later he was a right winger. At HVV he became national champion four times between 1901 and 1905. On 30 April 1905 he was captain during the first official interland of the Dutch national team. They beat Belgium with a 4–1 score. The second interland and first home match also saw Kessler leading the team. For his third and last interland in 1906 Dolf had passed the captaincy on to Kees Bekker. Kessler seriously considered a career in football until later that year he dislocated his knee, ending his career in football. Sports, however, remained important to him.
In 1907 Kessler graduated from the Technische Hogeschool Delft (Delft University of Technology), as a mechanical engineer. He got a job as secretary for Henri Deterding, who had succeeded Dolf's father as the director of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company. He worked for the company until 1915, when he left to look for a different job. As Joost Jonker and Jan Luiten van Zanden write in A History of the Royal Dutch Shell, his fiancee, Elizabeth "Bep" Stoop (herself a daughter of a prominent oil explorer, Adriaan Stoop), "put his love for her to the test by asking him to choose between her and the Group." His younger brother Jean Baptiste August "Guus" Kessler Jr., who had married Bep's cousin, Anna Francoise "Ans" Stoop, continued with the Royal Dutch and eventually rose to head their father's company.
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